Female Socialization and the Right to Speak
According to Foucault, parrhesia, a Greek word meaning “free speech”, is the right and duty of a person that wants to speak truth in the hopes of making change in society. In this case, “person” is translated to mean a male citizen in possession of “those specific personal, moral, and social qualities which grant one the privilege to speak”. So not only does this person have to be a man, but they also have to be one with the status that makes them worthy of being heard. Although this didn’t seem to be a problem for the Greeks, since women weren’t considered to be citizens−or much more than a man’s property− this can have a range of negative repercussions in modern society. After all, if many of the values of Western culture are derived from those of the Greeks, and they believed that women shouldn’t be able to speak out against an authority in public, what does this say about the ideas we build into our country about what women get to do today when it comes to using their voices?
From a young age, girls are constantly taught to think before they speak, to sugarcoat and filter their thoughts in order to avoid sounding “too aggressive”. When I was younger, my mom often told me not to say certain things because they were unladylike, too controversial, or too argumentative. Although well-meaning, she taught me that while my brothers argued, I should just stay out of it, stay quiet in order to avoid confrontation because after all, they were just being “dumb boys” anyway. But we don’t just learn these behaviors from our parents. Parents are only a small part in the process of socialization that everyone experiences in their lives. We also learn from peers and popular media, but it’s hard to expect progress if these two groups are influenced by an entire culture that thrives on the silence of women. If we are surrounded by friends that pride themselves in maintaining their composure and are shown films composed of mostly men speaking, telling girls that what they say matters, when all the evidence shows otherwise, becomes confusing.
Women and Parrhesia
In a 2013 TED Talk, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said,
“Girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think.”
If we are to assume that this is true, that women stop themselves from speaking their minds, what happens to parrhesia? Parrhesia, through which a speaker tells an audience everything that is on their mind, is suddenly harder to reach. If women using parrhesia to criticize society are forced to edit themselves in order to be taken seriously in a public arena, does it not count? I suppose that because of the changes, it wouldn’t be considered parrhesia in its truest form, but that doesn’t make it any less important or true to the women that are speaking up. If anything, it takes more courage to speak in public when you know that not everyone thinks you should even have the right to.
Another problem with women having access to parrhesia is that it seems implied that there are also special conditions that they must meet in order to use it. Melissa Lozada-Olivia outlines this point well in her spoken word poem “Like Totally Whatever”. In the poem, she states that “you can’t just challenge authority, you have to take it to the mall too”. Today, the “personal, moral, and social qualities” that we require of women have more to do with the way that they look and present their criticisms than what they are actually saying. If someone doesn’t like the way that a woman looks, suddenly what she’s saying is irrelevant. A woman’s truth can’t possibly be valid unless she wears pearls and bakes a pie while she presents it. Too often are the stories of rape victims dismissed because someone decided that their appearance meant more than their “no” and “stop”. The interesting thing about this superficial condition is that it is one usually exclusive to women. Because we are the unwanted guests, women have to look their best in order to be accepted, to be allowed to speak.
Parrhesia and Protest
However, this dislike some have for women speaking doesn’t mean that parrhesia in the face of adversity is impossible. What it does mean, is that words require more courage and come at a higher price, sometimes even at the cost of the speaker’s life. In Aleppo, 20 women committed suicide, choosing death over being raped by invading troops. For these women, the message that they sent about the power they had over their own destinies through control of their bodies became a form of parrhesia, one in which words turned into actions. Their deaths made people pay attention, listen to their criticisms about war and the price women pay even after they were gone. Although extremely unfortunate, the situation shows that for women, parrhesia is about more than just words. When women are taught that anything they say is the beginning of an argument, they simultaneously learn to be fighters who can prove the truth of their assertions through action. Women must speak their truth whenever possible because there is never a perfect time where people will want to listen to criticisms that run contrary to the popular opinion. It’s imperative that people understand that dissent, female dissent, will no longer be a quiet, inactive thing, only discussed on someone else’s schedule or when another person deems it appropriate.
